The present invention relates generally to crib structures and more particularly to cribs that are formed from metal rods.
Conventional cribs used for infants normally consist of a plurality of sides each of which is formed by a plurality of horizontally spaced vertically extending slats between upper and lower horizontal slats. Most of the cribs that are available today are made from wood to simplify the construction and assembling of crib structures. Wooden cribs have inherent problems in that infants have a tendency to "teethe" on the rail structure or slats. This results in the chipping of the paint off the slats as well as removing some of the wood during the life of the crib.
In addition to the above problem, with the continual shortage of quality wood, the cost of such cribs has increased substantially.
Quite recently, it has been proposed to form crib structures from metal rods rather than wood. All of the known crib structures commercialized to date have the vertical and horizontal rods interconnected by a welding process. In utilizing welding for interconnecting the horizontal and vertical rods, most of the cost for constructing a crib is in the assembling of the units. For example, it is extremely time consuming to weld the numerous vertical rods to the respective horizontal rods to form an entire crib.
Also, in order to have an attractive crib, most metal cribs have the rods coated with brass or other types of material. When a welding process is utilized, it is necessary to coat the weld as well as the area adjacent the weld with brass after the respective rods have been interconnected. The net result is that the cost of manufacturing such a unit is far in excess of the cost of manufacturing a wooden unit so that the metal crib is no longer competitive with the wooden crib.